Chris Nichol
Songs have a remarkable capacity to speak into a range of specific contexts. In doing so, their meaning can be completely transfigured. Sometimes it’s a conscious re-application, someone uplifting the music or melody and applying it to a different purpose. Take the melody of the British National Anthem, for example. Originally it was probably a sixteenth century plainsong or chant. Later, Purcell and Handel borrowed the tune and Purcell used it in association with the words “God save the King”. We know the words and music were sung together at the Drury Lane Theatre in 1745 as a patriotic response to the Scottish Jacobite victory over George II’s soldiers at the Battle of Prestopans. On that occasion it included this verse:
May the sedition hush, and like a torrent rush,
Rebellious Scots to crush, God save the King!”
Strangely, it seems the Jacobites themselves used the tune as a drinking song at the same time. Beethoven also wrote piano variations on the tune in 1804, possibly free of political sentiment. Even today the melody provides the tune to other nations’ patriotic songs including the United States’ “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee”.
Sometimes this transfiguration of melody or lyric can happen simply by accident or historical happenstance. In the days before Covid-19 took over our lives, when Corona meant a cold beer with a slice of lemon tucked in the top, we went to see Kate Tempest at the Festival of the Arts. To be honest, we knew practically nothing about her. She was billed as a spoken word and hip hop artist, a rapper, a poet, novelist and playwright. But that gave so much to go on we had no idea what to expect. It turned out her show was a dynamic and relentless waterfall of words that nailed a world of contemporary angst while still offering a glimpse of a positive future.
At a time when we are all isolated in our homes, teddy-bear-in- the-window hunts might keep exercising children amused in the street. Dunedin people are getting into the spirit. Our household currently lacks a teddy bear but we’ve put our wooden duck in the window as a tiny effort to relieve tedium. All round us people are engaging in acts of kindness: a wave from the window, a phone call or email to a distant friend, and then the essential workers – particularly those in the health system, providing treatment and care for on-going needs. In the face of relentless bad news, these acts keep us grounded and sane. And some people are truly inventive.
Remember MRS GREN, the mnemonic for the biological features necessary for organic life? Movement, Respiration, Sensation, Growth, Reproduction, Excretion, Nutrition. The great shared factor – the one that is present in them all – is movement, which occurs at some level, micro or macro, during every one of these functions. This intimate association between life and movement is reflected in human languages, which are laden with movement-related metaphors, imagery and symbolism. In English, for example, we speak of life cycles and seasonal cycles, of money or kindness making the world go round, of giving the nod or of shaking things off. We advise ‘going forward’ and ‘moving on’. We run ideas past other people; we are caught on the hop; we leap to conclusions; we take it step by step. Life, we say, is a journey. Sometimes we see the path clearly and lope along. Sometimes, however, we can’t see the woods for the trees, or our plans are stalled, or the wheels fall off, and everything comes to a grinding halt.
In the summer of 2005 I was visiting my sisters in my home town. After Mass a woman approached, put her arms around me and said, “Brian you are still alive. You were such a lovely boy”. My wife was standing nearby with a puzzled look on her face. It was not every day that strange women put their arms around her husband. That woman was Monica. Monica had nursed me one-on-one when I was fourteen and they thought I was going to die from polio. It was 49 years since Monica had last stood beside me. In 1956, Monica was twenty, and in charge of the isolation ward of the Ashburton hospital. I only ever saw her in a long white gown, rubber gloves and a white mask. She had beautiful blue eyes and wore rimless glasses. Her quiet voice encouraged me to eat and she held on to me when I went to the toilet. I needed her help to get sitting to standing, and because I could not stand she held me during the entire operation.
As a child, you always see your parents as these invincible super-humans. After all, they did put up with my psychologically traumatic teenage hormones at their peak. Parents want to protect you, they put on a brave face, they try to shelter you from what is dark in life. But sometimes they can’t, and sometimes, it’s important for them not to. When someone you see as so incredibly strong is forcibly made weak by disease, it’s an adjustment, to say the least. Before he got cancer, I had only seen my father fighting for me, and in that battle he was undefeated.
Motherhood is undervalued. And I feel like my culture’s view of what a mother should be is limited. I have a sense of somehow trying to claw back a self that is individuated from my child and active in the public sphere, because the question looms: is being just a mother enough? And what constitutes a good enough mother in the face of climate change, mass extinctions and a global mental health crisis? My child must live in this world.